The following relates to the data processing arts, data analysis, tracking arts, and so forth.
Cities change rapidly and in ways that are currently not sufficiently predictable, which presents substantial difficulties to public authorities when responding to the needs of their citizens. Accordingly, urban planning aims at establishing policies and organizing cities from a medium to long term point of view. Parts of a city or locations that once were used for industrial or agricultural purposes can become appropriated for residential use and cause shifts in the use of public transportation systems. However, such a change in usage may take a substantial period of time before becoming known to the public transportation system. Nowadays, tagging, i.e., identifying, location type (e.g., “Home” or “Work”) is usually obtained by surveys or simply obtained by experts of the transportation agencies who establish by “common knowledge,” routing and stop placements for the system. Surveys take a long time to be performed over the whole city and cannot be updated frequently. These methods lack accuracy, furthermore such tagging needs to be validated and followed over time, a necessarily time and labor intensive endeavor.
In the case of a public transportation network, cities store huge quantities of data about a traveler's schedule and location based upon ticketing, but do not use the collected information in order to understand better the usage of the transportation network and more specifically to detect the purpose of travel, i.e., identify the type of location at the traveler's destination. Other attempts to update tagging of location type include surveys (census data), architectural or type of building data, business registry, satellite or on street imagery. Such attempts involve manual input or manipulation of data. Additionally, the usage of such data may provide an indication of what the location could be, but fails to take into account what the location actually is used for, e.g., a former factory that has been converted to loft apartments, a former residence which is now used as a hotel or place of business, etc.